Maybe it’s because I’m native to New England, if you allow that designation to southwestern Connecticut. I do prefer tomatoes in my clam chowder (and my father dug the clams), and I do root for the Mets even though I have two degrees from B.U. and lived for years within organ-sound distance of Fenway Park.

However, I don’t think I’m too far from my New England nativity, and my New England reality, when I say that the best sign of hope we have here is late winter. Even if B.U. lost its chance for the Beanpot this year.

Here’s how I define late winter. There’s snow on the ground. That snow reflects the light of the sun and the moon and makes a shiny light all its own. It’s too early for furniture outside, or houseplants, but those houseplants have started shooting new growth. It is brighter now, dawn breaks a little earlier, I can read without artificial light a little longer, sunset is rosier, Orion and his dog-star Sirius hunt farther in the west than they did at Christmas, and only in late June will the days get shorter again.

Back in my Connecticut childhood, my mother, who could be fairly described as easily frustrated and short-tempered, would get angry at her only child over the smallest things. How useless was it to either of us to make this tomboy cry in pain by tying my poker-straight hair in horrid rubber “curlers” that left me with, well, poker-straight hair?

At times like that, my mother would yell at me, “You’re going to drive me to Newtown,” that being the site of the state mental institution.

Now, it seems that the whole nation has been driven to Newtown.

In my adult life, my husband and I choose not to have television, but a friend of ours who does told me that he stopped watching the news when they began to interrupt coverage of the 26 Newtown funerals to air commercials of little children happily playing with Christmas toys. Is there anything moral or ethical, let alone in the “virgin mother and child” Christmas aura, about using funerals of babies and their teachers to sell plastic?

My father fought in World War II. His first kill of a German soldier happened on Christmas eve, and when he kicked the body over, he discovered that he had shot a young teenager. Christmas eve was never good for him after that, and therefore never good for me, born a few years after the war.

He would have nothing to do with guns after he came home from Europe and North Africa.

The Newtown massacre put me in mind of my parents. Each one, at some time, delivered me to my first-grade classroom. We also camped with some neighbors at a lake not too far from Newtown.

We all had something to sort out.

My father had the rottenness of war. My mother had the pressure of living as a working woman in mid-twentieth-century America.

I was trying to understand why I could read a newspaper when everyone else was struggling with stories written in big letters about girls and boys and dogs. I had also been inducted into the grownup world with the news of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

In black and white, on those big cabinet TVs of the day, I watched Stalin’s statue toppled. I watched Soviet tanks roll the streets of Budapest. I met people who fought – people with stories such as the one about two men who had to drive a car together, one steering and one pressing on the pedals, to compensate for one’s injury and the other’s lack of driver training. I even helped, as a little primary pupil, to teach English to the refugees.

I don’t think I’ve ever spoken for my parents before. They are long dead and our communication involved more emotion than reason.

But I don’t think I’m out of line to say what I want to say now.

When either one of them drove the 6-year-old me to school – a school not terribly far from the one in Newtown – we did figure, for better or worse, that we’d see each other again.